#MakeoverMonday G-7 employment growth

The fifth week of #MakeoverMonday presented participants with a small dataset comparing G-7 countries’ share of total employment with their share of net growth in employment. The original visualisation was a pair of pie charts. One pie chart is generally bad enough (unless it has an appropriately low number of dimension members) but two? There must be a better way.

My approach this week was just to try a few different chart types and see which best allowed comparison of the two metrics. Once I’d made a third chart (a diverging bar chart, after a scatterplot and a barbell chart), I decided that I’d like to figure out how sheet swapping is achieved in Tableau. I was aware of the basic concept, but hadn’t ever tried it out.

Google came to the rescue yet again, and I unearthed this article on the Tableau site (and then I found this from Data Schooler Hashu Shenkar). Even better, I then found that Andre de Vries had shared a video of the technique:

All three resources are really clear, so I won’t dive into my usual overview of the process. It’s as simple a technique as that trio of examples linked above show, and I just followed along with the one from the Tableau online help section.

Other than that, the only notable trick in my submission this week was the 45 degree trend line on the scatterplot. That was something that Andy Kriebel uploaded a video about in March 2016:

So this small dataset still gave me a chance to practise something new and to deploy some tips that I have read about in the past 9 months or so. It won’t be the best submission of the week technically or aesthetically, but that continued learning curve is the thing I value most.